Estimated incidence rate of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) linked to laundered reusable healthcare textiles (HCTs) in the United States and United Kingdom over a 50-year period: Do the data support the efficacy of approved laundry practices?

[...]the total number of HAI cases in the United States plus the United Kingdom over this entire 50-year period was ∼100 million actual cases (5,500 HAI cases per day in the US plus UK populations). Based on the 69 HAIs attributed to laundered HCTs over 50 years, we further added a very high speculation factor that infections related to reusables may be underreported by using 100 times the reported laundry-related HAIs to do this risk analysis. [...]the laundry-related HAIs were scaled to 6,900 in the entire 50 years of record (0.37 cases per day). The estimated total healthcare HAI for the United States and United Kingdom over this same period is 5,500 cases per day (38,000 cases per week) (Table 1). [...]in probability terms, the chance of a patient having an HAI linked to contact with the laundered, reusable textile is ∼1 in 14,900 (5,500/0.37 = 14,900).